FARRAR, LOCHLIN JOHNSON

FARRAR, LOCHLIN JOHNSON (1837–1901). Lochlin Johnson Farrar, lawyer, legislator, and Confederate soldier, was born on December 27, 1837, in DeKalb County, Georgia, the son of Jesse C. and Nancy (Johnson) Farrar. He was educated in Atlanta and moved in 1858 to Austin, where he read law in the office of George W. Paschal. He was admitted to the bar on January 4, 1859. On February 14 of that year he moved to Limestone County and established a practice in Springfield. Joseph Abbott read law in Farrar's office and subsequently became his partner for a time. In 1860 Farrar, who was living in a hotel, owned no land and had only $300 in personal property.

In 1861, with the outbreak of the Civil War, Farrar raised the first company from Limestone County, the "Limestone County Volunteers," and joined Col. William H. Parsons's Twelfth Texas Cavalry regiment. The sixty-two-man company soon became restive and abandoned its camp of instruction after only three weeks in the army. Farrar remained with Parsons, however, as a private; he soon rose to sergeant major and then in 1862 to major, at Little Rock, Arkansas. After service in Arkansas and in the Red River campaign in Louisiana in 1864, Farrar was paroled in Hempstead in 1865.

With the close of the war Farrar taught school in Limestone County through the latter months of 1865 and into 1866, when he was elected district attorney for the Fifteenth Judicial District. He was removed from office in 1867, however, by Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, who considered him "an impediment to Reconstruction." Farrar returned to the practice of law in Groesbeck in partnership with A. C. Prendergast until he was elected as a Democrat to the House of Representatives of the Fourteenth Legislature. In July 1869 Farrar married Mattie Starley; they had two children. In 1882 he was elected to the Senate of the Nineteenth Texas Legislature. He served as chairman of the Committee on State Asylums. His term expired in November 1886, after which he helped to organize and became the first president of the First National Bank of Groesbeck. Farrar was elected one of the vice presidents of the Parsons's Texas Cavalry Brigade Association at its first meeting in Corsicana on August 8, 1881. He delivered the principal addresses to the annual reunion at Alvarado on August 2, 1883, and at Cleburne on August 5, 1885. He died in 1901.

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